The most wondrous sight anyone who can afford a modest sized telescope will ever see is Orion.
An eight inch will allow you to penetrate Orions depths.
When the clouds part on a still night the ultimate climax is Orion.

I have been seeing the constellation of Orion rising from this back yard for 12 years. I know exactly where it should rise from where I stand. THE
CONSTELLATION OF ORION IS IN THE WRONG PLACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I just went out with my compass and saw that Orion is at least 25 degrees off of
it's normal rising spot

I really hope I can figure out how to put up a pic here! Anyway, should my links work, the diagrams show the distance of the stars relative to how we
perceive them from observing from Earth, the stars are not anywhere near each other, thus, would be a MEGA Miracle if all were to tilt at the precise
moment so as to stay together as a still Earthly observable group...

Originally posted by Speedtek
I work at an observatory, the software used for telescope pointing was written over 10 years ago. When I tell the telescope to go to any star in
Orion, it lands dead center on it. The same can be said for any amateur "go-to" type telescope.

If Orion was moving position in the sky (and it does move, but only in a cosmological time frame, aka millions of years) every one of these scopes
would be off and trust me, it would be noticed.

I think he's been standing too close to the microwave.

To do this what point do you start from?

If its from a star & you tell the telescope to move so far it will still take you to the right place. Can you please check the cordinance now &
previous?

Many people out there still use a equaltorial mount that is not computer controlled at
all.

Here is a picture of one:

How this works:

Once you have the mount set up outside, and leveled (most come with a bubble level on the mount, and the legs of the tripod adjust), you then use the
very small telescope that is built into the mount to align the mount with the Earth's rotational axis. We do this by pointing that small telescope at
the north star, Polaris. Here is a picture of where that is on the mount:

In the picture above, the red arrows are showing you where the aligning scope is and the direction you look into it (there is a cover on the eye piece
part of it).
The green circle is showing the part you adjust to align the mount to the north star.
In order to do that, you have to know your Latitude and Longitude of where you are, and that will tell you how many degrees to adjust in elevation to
align to the north star.

Once you have done that, you then adjust the telescope's Right Ascension and Declination adjustments to go to an object in the sky:

The blue circle in the above picture is the Declination. The red circle is the Right Ascension.

If the Earth has moved (IE pole shift, etc), then when we go to align to Polaris (the north star) the angle of elevation for that adjustment would be
off by many degrees. Meaning when we look up what it's suppose to be for our latitude and longitude it would be wrong, and Polaris would not show up
in the aligning scope at all. We'd have to adjust for it, and would see that our telescope is off by many degrees, which would raise a lot of red
flags for us astronomers.

But I'm happy to report that so far none of us have had to do this, and Polaris is right where it is suppose to be.

Here is some food for thought for those of you out there that keep insisting that the Earth has pole shifted, is pole shifting, etc, etc:

If the Earth's crust were to shift so that the north pole is no longer where it is suppose to be, you will suddenly no longer be able to have the
following:

(there are several other things too, but most people have these things, or know someone that does).

Cable TV is listed because the cable companies use satellite farms to get the signals from satellite TV, combine it, and send it to you through the
cable network.

You see, if the Earth's poles (crustal poles) were to shift, we would move, but those satellites won't. They'll still be in the same place.
If you had Direct TV or The Dish, you'd suddenly loose the signal, and would not be able to get it back, without having to go outside and literally
move your satellite dish (and if our crust moved too much, even that would not do you any good).

If you had a Tom-Tom or Garmin in your car and asked it the directions to your local Walmart, it would try to send you to the Grand Canyon, Brazil,
Paris, or god knows where, because your position on the Earth is now completely different than where the GPS satellite network says you should be.

Even a shift of just 5 degrees would make you loose your TV, or have your GPS trying to make you take a left turn into a building.

The telescope we use is mounted at a fixed polar position. This means that the mount is set to point at Polaris, and any alignment or pointing depends
on that. If any calibration adjustment is made to re-center a star, the star in question would drift out of the field of view if the polar alignment
was bad (if the stars were not in the right position from a change in the Earth's position).

This content community relies on user-generated content from our member contributors. The opinions of our members are not those of site ownership who maintains strict editorial agnosticism and simply provides a collaborative venue for free expression.